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1.
The self-delusion of risk-assessment
The
four discussion groups in this workshop on interaction between
bioscience and society deal with four questions. The first two of
them are “does bioscience threaten human integrity?”
and “does bioscience threaten ecological
integrity?”.
Two aspects of human integrity may
be distinguished, because man lives on two different levels. In
the “biologistic” view he is defined mainly by the
molecular structure of his chromosomes and those connection
patterns of neurons which are genetically fixed. We may subsume
this biological phenomenon, which has proven its viability on the
time-scale of millions of years, under the concept of the
biosphere or the “ecological system” – i.e. all
the time-tested interactions within “Gaia” and,
eventually, “the Universe”. On this level, from
physics up to the animals, complexity is already nearly infinite,
but on the mental level (represented in space, time and matter by
human cerebra and the cultural phenomena springing from them) it
may become still very much higher.
Although, on either
level, integrity cannot be defined operationally or in any other
scientific sense, damage to this complex web is not only a threat
but an empirical fact. If interference on the relatively low
level of chemistry has already shattered the climate of the
earth, and if human activities now exstirpate one or more living
species every hour, it would be absurd to claim that interference
at still higher levels of complexity is more likely to create
less problems than it “solves”. So, scarcely a
scientist will deny the possibility of threats from bioscience to
the ecosphere as well as to human individuals and societies. The
general answer to the first and second question will be yes –
but the attitude towards the unknown threats and the proposals
for action will still lie anywhere between megalomanic hope and
humble modesty. Let me give two examples:
(a) “Having
understood the basic laws of physics and biochemistry, we now
have to improve man and his environment on the physical and
biological level. Since there may be a chance of success,
humanity cannot evade this task. If we weigh the benefits and
risks responsibly, an overall positive result is very likely. But
even if we fail, and destroy more than we improve, this is no
threat to human dignity, as long as we acted in good will. The
essentially human cannot be harmed by individual death, by loss
of species, or even by the end of the world.”
(b)
“Complexity on the level of organisms and ecology is so
high that hasty “problem-solving” is likely to create
far more new problems. On the other hand, it is evident that in
the realm of mind and culture ideas have evolved which are able
to deal with such “old-fashioned” problems as need,
disease and death. Therefore, let us try and restrict our
activities as far as possible to the mental and cultural level
and renounce all interference with mind’s natural
roots.”
How do scientists and the society steer
between such extremes? Is there a generally convincing way of
finding out, which might be more reasonable?
The questions
to the third and fourth discussion group are: “What’s
wrong with the interaction between bioscience and society?”
and “What actions are required to improve the uneasy
relationship between bioscience and society?”. The
discussions in the four groups are meant to be guided by the
general heading of the workshop: “Do current and
anticipated developments in bioscience require a new covenant
between science and society?.
Most active scientists
will feel uneasy with this question. Wasn’t the old
covenant sufficient, which made it perfectly clear who is the
superior partner in this relationship? Society has needs,
scientists offer inexhaustible hope. Natural selection within the
economy of science has taken care that most of them are
optimists. No wonder that, since God died of enlightenment,
science had to take over the role of the “opium for the
people” – which secures fat living at least for the
big dealers. For them, there was nothing uneasy in this relation.
And didn’t it bring permanent progress?
Society
wants progress – and the more it has had of it, the more it
needs. Some already find it a shame that science will not find a
cure against death before they die. On the other hand, the fear
of “side-effects” is growing equally fast. Clearly,
some kind of suppression is necessary in the fight between
contradictory fears and hopes. It organizes itself in the
interaction between science and society. Like with the hen and
the egg, we cannot say where the process starts. Society feels a
strong urge to get away from where it is, because the present
state seems rather intolerable in spite of or because of all
former progress. Experts offer some beneficial innovation.
Society asks about possible risks. The experts describe those
which they can anticipate and say society should now do the
“weighing” between benefits and risks. Society says
the experts must help with that weighing, and calls them into a
committee for risk-assessment. Since it is utterly unscientific
to talk about, or even mention, something which one doesn’t
understand, the problem of the “unanticipated”
dangers is suppressed from the discussion. Even if a risk should
become hazily visible, one can always add weight to the clearly
recognized benefit which promises to deliver us from “the
urgent problems of mankind”, such as hunger, disease, lack
of resources and sinks and other degradation of the
environment.
The promised land of scientists and
businessmen in gene-technology, like the promised lands behind
all those other doors which key-technologies (or
picklock-technologies, or even breakthrough-technologies?) are
supposed to open, will be full of new problems, and more urgent
ones. But this will not be due to the “current and
anticipated developments”. The greatest threats come
always unexpected. However, since this is also true for the
biggest successes, the experts as well as the majority in society
tell themselves and each other that the unknown very big risks
and benefits will just be in equilibrium and can be left out in
the “weighing”. If something goes wrong, scientists
and technologists cannot be held responsible for unanticipated
trouble. Neither can society. Responsible action is by definition
up to the present and foreseeable standard of science and
technology – which is defined by the same experts who do
the riskassessment, though usually in a different committee which
society called for that purpose. (For instance, since all the
mutual regulation of genes is far too complex to be ever
understood, it is serviceable to declare an “additive
model” the present scientific standard …)
So,
what about the unanticipated developments? Society can’t be
held responsible. It has regulated by law that scientists and
technologists act responsibly if they act according to the
present standard, and the enforcement of the law is controlled by
experts and other members in “ethicscommittees”.
Everybody has done his best. Now, if God isn’t responsible,
and the scientist isn’t, and the technologist isn’t,
and society isn’t – who is?
2.
The Devil-Theorem
Obviously, there is
something wrong with the logical structure of the old covenant. A
reliable concept of responsibility must be included in the common
minimal basis for an ethics of science and technology. In a
pluralist world-society this cannot be expected from any of the
old gods. Emancipation from truth in the sence of any religious
fundamentalism is certainly worth striving for. Neither can the
ethical basis come from research about how our genes influence
the growth and the functioning of our neural networks. A
“biologistic” ethics would be as ridiculous as ethics
from quantum mechanics. There is, however, a fundamental truth
which is able to convince instead of indoctrinating, and which
comes even before the laws of nature. This unevadable truth is
logic. Surprisingly, in scientists’ considerations about
ethics, a very simple logical insight is usually being
suppressed:
If results of a creative act are not clearly
forseeable, the difference between “good” and “evil”
is a matter of the time-scale and the “degree of globality”
of the action. The consequence: One has to “wait and see”,
and old diversity must not be sacrificed quickly to
“unification”.
It took billions of years until
God “saw that it was good”. Hans Machleidt, a German
biochemist, active in education and in the chemical industry, a
member in many committees, recently wrote: “Gene-technology
has as its contents the planned new combination of the genetic
material of living beings. This science has learnt from nature by
patient observation, and is by now 15 years old …”
He was argueing against intervention from politics which was then
threatening the “impetuous dynamics of progress” and
the “innovation dynamics” in our country. Mentioning
both nature and the 15 years, he touches the fundamental problem
but doesn’t see it.
We know now that creation
followed the general principle of self-organization. This
principle is surprisingly trivial: At each stage, from big bang
through the formation of matter, astrophysical structures, the
origin and evolution of life, up to our thinking and feeling, the
unavoidable fluctuations explore the “neighbourhood in the
space of possibilities”, and a more viable situation
survives. Nobody will quarrel any more about this Darwinian
tautology which does not mean more than “probably,
something more likely is going to happen”. Now, the more
viable is likely to be of higher complexity, if there is a larger
number of neighbouring possibilities to be tried via the
fluctuations, and if there is time to try more and more of them
until something is found where “things fit together still a
bit better” and which is therefore “selected”
according to the laws of probability. The proper meaning of time
is the growth of complexity – which we perceive as the
creation of values. Big Bang has provided time and free energy,
combinatorics provides an immense number of possibilities, and
the laws of physics have made possible long-lived environments in
which manifold trial and error could go on.
Remember how
the number of possible relation structures grows with the number
of related objects: Between two points you can draw a line or not
– which makes two possibilities. With three points you find
eight, with four points sixty-four … How many points do
you need in order that the number of possible different relation
structures is larger than the number of atoms in the universe?
The answer is: Twenty-four points! So, obviously, there is always
an immense number of “better” possibilities in the
neighbourhood – but there is practically no chance of
finding them by “planning” because the “worse”
possibilities are always infinitely more frequent. Even if all
matter of the world were used to build a computer, and if this
would run for the age of the universe, not even all relations
between 24 points could be tried. This is why “planning
replaces chance by error” …
At any epoch in
this process of self-organization of the universe, there will be
a “front of evolution” in the space of possibilities.
(Because of the isolation of stars and planets, there might be
many quite independent fronts at the moment.) The speed of
innovation at such a front is likely to be accelerated, because
higher evolutionary speed carries a selective advantage by
definition. Clearly, this will lead to a run-away instability at
this front. Due to lack of time for trial and error possibilities
will be realized in which things don’t fit together
anymore. The front will cut its own roots to the whole and will
collapse. In a spatially large system with many different local
fronts this has to be judged as one of the usual errors which are
absolutely necessary for evolutionary success. As long as the
run-away and collapse remain spatially restricted, trial and
error will go on elsewhere in space and at other fronts in the
space of possibilities, too. In a spatially finite system,
however, accelerated evolution must eventually lead into a global
crisis. The evolutionary “success” will (again by
definition) spread in space – i.e. “geographically”
- until global run-away is reached. Then “the whole”
(or the whole “island”) must fall back to a “lower
level” in the space of possibilities.
Can such
general system-theoretical considerations teach us anything about
our doom? Yes. At any epoch, the beings at the front of evolution
– the present “crown of creation” – will
incorporate the highest degree of internal complexity. (There is
probably some meaning in such a statement, although it introduces
a dangerous concept. The very idea of “internal complexity”
of parts would imply knowledge of their relative isolation and
the time-scales of all “border-crossings”. Properly
defined complexity will not be a property of parts but of the
whole. Even mathematicians are now realizing that a meaningful
measure of complexity would have to deal with the history of the
whole …) In order to replicate this internal complexity,
the individual needs a typical lifetime. This span of life (or
“generation time) sets a lower limit to the time within
which an essential gain in complexity (“creation of
values”) might be achieved. Of course, the complexity of
the whole might be damaged already at a much slower pace, but
faster change will not even allow to take into account the own
internal complexity, i.e. the value of the present “crown
of creation”. And still, until the speed of innovation has
become so high that those beings drastically change their own
essentials within their own lifetime, further acceleration and
global unification will be selected for. The tautology remains
true that probably something more likely is going to happen –
but no longer is the rise to higher complexity the more likely.
Global decomposition of complexity sets in and accelerates
further towards collapse.
Have you recognized the global
ecological and social crisis which we are experiencing right now
on the time-scale of our own life? This is a singular epoch in
the history of the earth, and evolution unavoidably had to run
into it after its front had moved from spelling a few new letters
per generation (in the genetic code) to trying new ideas in our
neural networks within milliseconds. The basic principle of
self-organization is still the same as ever. The front is now in
our brains and their associations, and planning is just a
different word for groping our way into the space of
possibilities via fluctuations. However, the rate of fluctuations
in brains, the speed of interaction between them, and the speed
of their interference with the environment have made the system
reach the point where destruction of the old complexity becomes
more likely than its growth. The broken bits are still immensely
complicated, but things no longer fit together in real
complexity. The blossoms at the tree of life are still beautiful,
but they expand like mad, drop the leaves in order to gain space
and simplify the view for planning. Attempting to fertilize the
tree they poison its roots … Inevitably, evolution now
seems to destroy its own preconditions: the immense diversity and
the leisure for selection.
A simple objection to this
“pessimistic” system-theoretical argument is the
following: The mind’s level of complexity is so much higher
than that of any preceding dead or living structures, that the
destruction or an essential reduction of the old biological
complexity means a negligible loss of value. Isn’t it even
possible that mind emancipates itself from flesh? Certainly, this
is “possible” – as one of the infinitely many
ideas in the space of possibilities! But how likely is it to be
reached by fluctuations during our epoch at our front in this
space? Clearly, the probability is infinitesimal. So, this
objection is nothing but that old insinuation of the snake on the
tree of knowledge.
You see: There is an old name for the
problem. No surprise, since it was so obvious to human intuition
long before the critical time-scale and the global scale had been
reached through the evolution of science, technology and economy.
The principle has long been recognized. It is called the Devil,
“diabolos”, i.e. he who throws things into disorder.
As an angel, i.e. as a part of the divine principle of creation,
he has also been called Lucifer, i.e. the bringer of light –
but then he tumbles down into hell – which we might call a
black hole, the utterly simplified world, the bottom in the space
of possibilities … He is the same figure as Prometheus,
the “fore-thinker”. Remember Pandora’s box, and
how its lid was taken off – i.e. its “discovery”
or “de-tection” or “apo-kalypse” …
The
Devil isn’t evil. He just wants to improve the world more
quickly than this is logically possible. Just like scientists and
technologists and politicians.
3.
How to convince the Devil
You may say, God’s
way is no longer reachable in our neighbourhood in the space of
possibilities. We can no longer wait and “see that it was
good”. The Devil has lead us already so far in the global
run-away that we cannot but follow him further. I hope this is
not true. Can’t we try a “moratorium” in all
the key- and picklock-technologies? Maybe, ten times longer than
that after Asilomar? Couldn’t we use that time to
reduce all the activities which we have recognized as destructive
to the roots of old complexity? With a reduction of 3% per year,
we would arrive at 20% of the present level of destructive
activities after fifty years. This is what we would have to
achieve in the burning of fossil fuels, the setting-free of
chemical compounds which have not been tested in co-evolution
with the biosphere, in soil erosion and in many other activities
– in fact in nearly every activity which is now considered
to be essential for our “standard of living” and for
“job creation”. If we could reach a new covenant,
riskassessment would no longer deal with detailed experiments and
techniques but rather with whole branches of applied science and
industry. The word “break-through” would make you
think of drowning under thin ice – not of getting rich
booty after a battle.
Of course, all this will not be the
topic of our workshop. I don’t expect the devil-theorem to
be made the basis of an “ethics from science” before
the ecological and social collapse has proceeded still further.
Eventually, however, the “opium for the people” will
no longer be able to suppress the pain; acts of sabotage will
embarrass the dealers; social turbulence will counteract global
simplification; big powers will collapse, and in some smaller
communities people will re-discover why God could have seen that
it was good. Then, they will understand that we must not try and
improve the world in the language of nuclear forces or the
genetic code, but in our own language. If the biosphere is
conserved, or influenced only very slowly, if the front of
evolution is basically restricted to our mental and cultural
activities, and if diversity at this front is kept or re-gained,
we may be able to organize boundary conditions under which
evolution on earth can continue. The spreading of a logical
insight is the only task which we have to fulfill in a hurry, and
globally. The inevitability of the crisis does not mean that it
cannot be overcome. The word crisis means decision.
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